Is learning to code still useful now that AI can write it?

By The Code Zone team · 3 September 2026 · 7 min read

The two answers you will find online, and why neither helps

The first says coding is finished. Nobody will write code by hand in ten years, so stop paying for it and find an "AI skills" course instead. The second says nothing has changed, carry on as you were. Both are usually written by somebody selling the thing they are recommending, and to be fair that includes us, so read what follows knowing that.

What has actually changed is the typing. AI is now very good at producing code that looks right, and often is right, for things that have been built many times before. What has not changed is knowing what you want, working out why the thing on the screen is not doing it, and being able to tell the difference between code that is correct and code that merely sounds confident. That second list was always the job. The first list was the bit everyone found tedious.

We first wrote about this in May 2024, when the honest description of AI code was "a confident first draft that a human has to fix". Rereading it now, the description has dated and the conclusion has not. Professional developers do use these tools every day, the code that comes out is a great deal better than it was, and the reason a child should still learn to code has, if anything, got stronger. Here is the 2026 version.

What AI is genuinely good at

Ask it for Flappy Bird and you will have a playable Flappy Bird inside a minute. That is impressive, and it is worth being clear about why it works: a thousand Flappy Birds already exist. The model has read all of them.

Now ask it for the game in your child's head. The one with the rule they invented on the way home from school, where the enemies get faster every time you collect a coin but slower if you stand still. You will get something that is almost that. It will be confidently almost that. The gap between "almost what I asked for" and "what I actually meant" is the whole of programming, and it always was. The tool has moved the starting line, not the finish.

The other thing to know is that it is exactly as confident when it is wrong. It will explain, warmly and in full sentences, why its broken code is fine. A child who cannot read the code back has no way of knowing which of the two they have been handed. That is not a reason to keep children away from it. It is a reason to make sure they can read before they are handed it.

The bit AI does was never the point

Nobody has ever sent a nine year old to a coding club so that they could type semicolons faster. Strip that away and the reasons parents actually give us have not changed at all.

They want their child to be able to take a big fuzzy idea and break it into small steps that can each be done. They want them to be wrong, repeatedly, in a place where being wrong is normal and nobody is watching, and to find out for themselves why. They want them to build the thing that was in their head rather than consume the thing that was in somebody else's. And, whether or not they would put it this way, they want them to learn the oldest rule in the trade: the computer does exactly what you said, not what you meant.

That last one has quietly become the most useful thing a child can learn, because it is precisely the skill you need to get anything worthwhile out of an AI. Saying clearly what you want, reading what comes back, and noticing where the two differ. A child who has spent a year being told "not what you meant" by a compiler is unusually well prepared for a world where the thing telling them is friendlier and less honest.

How to tell whether your child is learning or just generating

You do not need to be able to code to check this. Four things to try, none of which involve saying no to the tool.

Ask them to change one thing. Make the jump higher. Add a second enemy. A child who understands what they have built will go and do it, possibly badly, possibly with help. A child who generated it has to go back and ask the machine, and quite often gets a slightly different game back, with the thing they liked about the first one gone.

Point at a line and ask what it does. Any line. "I don't know, but it works" is a perfectly honest answer, and it is also the signal. It tells you the code is on their screen but not yet in their head. We have written separately about the questions to ask when you cannot code yourself, and they work just as well on generated code as on the home-made kind.

Watch what happens when it breaks. Generated code tends to break the moment it meets a change it was not written for. Does your child read the error message, or paste it straight back into the chat? Reading it is the skill. Pasting it is a coin toss.

Ask what they would build if anything were possible. If the answer is specific and slightly too ambitious, you have a maker who is using a tool. If the answer is "I don't know, I'll ask it", the tool is doing the imagining as well, and that is the part worth worrying about.

None of this means ban it. It tells you which order to do things in.

What we do about it in the clubs

In our sessions the children write the code themselves. They start in Scratch or MakeCode, move to Python when they are ready and on to TypeScript if they stay with it, building their own games the whole way rather than working through a set course. The mentor is alongside them in a group of no more than six, the same mentor every week, and a large part of what a mentor does is ask questions: why did you do it that way, what do you think happens if you change that, where would you look first.

That is not because we are against AI. We use AI tools ourselves for the dull parts of running a club, and our in-person clubs have a Building with AI strand where members find out how the thing works from the inside and have a go at making things with it. It is because the order matters. A child who has spent a year writing their own loops can look at a generated one and say "that never resets the score". A child who has not can only hope.

The fundamentals come first, then the tools. As members reach the upper levels and start to work out what kind of developer they might want to be, the wider toolset comes with that, and by then they can judge what it gives them. We would rather a fifteen year old used AI well than a nine year old used it at all.

So, is it still worth it?

Nobody knows what the job market looks like in 2040, us included, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. But learning to code at nine was never a job plan. It is the nearest thing a child has to finding out how the objects they use all day actually work, and now that one of those objects can talk back, and be confidently wrong, understanding it from the inside matters more than it did, not less.

If your child has already outgrown the tool they started with, we have written about what comes next. If you are choosing between clubs, here are the questions to ask any of them, and it is worth adding one more: ask what they do about AI, and whether the children are writing the code or generating it.

If you would like to see what it looks like, the first session with us is a free taster. Book a taster and the mentor will start from wherever your child is, generated games and all.